In many applications, electronic equipment is interconnected and communicates via a network. An example of electronic equipment interconnected in a network includes avionics, such as a radar system, on an aircraft. To accommodate performance enhancements and their associated increase in data requirements, advanced systems may include a fibre channel network. Each node on a network can simultaneously transmit and receive according to a full duplex transmit-receive protocol. For example, each data word may include 32 bits and each frame up to 528 data words. Each frame as part of a sequence and the sequences can be part of different exchanges. Therefore, one frame may be out of context without the other frames from the same sequence of an exchange.
Fibre channel networks may include switches to enable communication to occur simultaneously between two nodes, such as a four-port fibre channel switch. With multiple switches, multiple paths can be found and, therefore, variable frame delays may result.
More specifically, in conventional fibre channel networks having multiple switches X, Y, and Z, and multiple nodes A and B, one communication path may become busy for an instant in time. This may cause a next frame in a sequence to be routed using another path, which can create different delays for each frame of a sequence. For example, the following sequence may be sent by the node A: FRAME #1, FRAME #2, FRAME #3, FRAME #4, FRAME #5, and FRAME #6. However, the sequence received by the node B may be as follows: FRAME #1, FRAME #3, FRAME #2, FRAME #5, FRAME #4, and FRAME #6. A lower level device driver of the receiving node may be responsible for reordering the frames back to the original order.
Although desirable results have been achieved using such prior art systems, there may be room for improvement. For example, it may be desirable to monitor and record data communicated within a fibre channel network. However, because multiple devices may be communicating simultaneously, and due to redundancy considerations, the monitoring and recording of networks having multiple switches may be complex and expensive to implement, and may entail intrusive modifications to hardware, such as providing special ports on switches. Furthermore, such monitoring may be time and labor intensive, and limited in applicability. Advanced apparatus and methods for fibre channel interface units and for methods of encoding and merging multiple data streams within fibre channel networks that at least partially mitigate these characteristics would be useful.